Party in Hard Times

Time to Take Your Clothes Off and Contemplate Your Impotence

The worst one-two finish in the history of the Pazz & Jop Critics'
Poll couldn't have come in a worse year, and it's my sworn duty to
tell you why. The year was so bad it quashed a worthier worst one-two
finish and continued on to a worst one-two-three, so bad that a worse
finish yet could come in a worse year yet--namely, the 2003 this worst
year sets up. But hey--rock and roll, big deal. If next Presidents'
Day Annan has snookered Wolfowitz and Sharon is on a leash and the
worst son of a bad man has failed to slip another quantum of GNP to
the one percenters, I won't care if Pazz & Jop does go to early
favorite Daniel Lanois. Meanwhile, history sucks, and headed by two of
the dullest works of well-turned semipopularity ever to contemplate
their own impotence, our 29th or 30th poll sucks right along with it.

One way or another, artists can't help responding to current
events. The question isn't whether, it's how--with denial always an
option. From Tweedy and Beck to Cee-Lo and Karen O, from Charles Aaron
to Shannon Zimmerman, almost all our finishers and the vast majority
of our respondents are dismayed if not outraged by September 11's
fallout: the imminent attack on Iraq, invasions of privacy bleeding
into curbs on expression, the arrant escalation of the class war
initiated by Reagan. But that doesn't mean they know what to do about
it, and this old artistic dilemma is further snarled in reactions to
September 11 proper that go deeper than outrage and dismay: mourning,
disorientation, uncertainty, fear. While the oligarchs in Washington
jumped to arrogate more power to their cohort, the rest of us grieved,
seethed, tossed and turned, worried about right and wrong, and tried
to reclaim our lives. Recall if you will how brave and weird it felt
to go to a club or celebrate a birthday in the early autumn of
2001. Then realize that a lot of the apparently apolitical music
honored by our critics this year was created under comparable
emotional circumstances.

And then add the complication that a lot of it couldn't have been,
because it predates that pivotal day. Eight of our top 40 got votes in
last year's poll: Hives, Drive-By Truckers, Super Furry Animals,
Andrew W.K., Soundtrack of Our Lives, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an earlier
version of the N.E.R.D. album, and our winner (do the words "back
story" mean anything to you?); so did several of the information
thefts expropriated for the illegal-times-two Best Bootlegs in the
World Ever. Linda Thompson's return is a life project, and many
early-2002 releases--Streets, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Doves,
Clinic, Cee-Lo--were begun if not finished before the world
changed. Even Steve Earle's Jerusalem, with its focus track
claiming John Walker Lindh is a human being, was mostly written by
August 2001. And except for Jerusalem, which insisted, and our
winner, so redolent it wrapped any meaning its admirers hung on it in
a haze of regret, none of these albums was burdened with ex post facto
relevance. All registered as getting-on-with-our-lives records,
background music for a party in hard times.

These before-and-after distinctions will seem overly fine to two
camps that concur on little else: the hedonists who scoff at any
politicization of pop discourse and the moralists for whom pop
discourse is never political enough. Both find that music post-9/11
was as down with its own program as ever. Even our critically
sanctioned kind is escapist on the singles chart, where the artistic
action is bright of plumage and light of foot to compensate, and
self-involved on the album chart, where blue brontosauri, hoary
anodynes, great-headed shows of significance, and other protected
species still rumble across the plain: Solomon Burke's latest
comeback, which has him trading backslaps with once-famed songwriters
in a push-me-pull-you bacchanal the Grammys understand too well, or
Sigur R--s's deliberately incomprehensible attempt to bring Debussyan
tone color to their gray-green land. But other bands demonstrated that
formalism needn't be ponderous to be self-referential. Austin's Spoon
jacked up their groove and pared down their sound on an album that
accentuates keyboard yet announces its intentions with the opening
words "small stakes"; Dakar's Orchestra Baobab ended the long
retirement that followed their climactic final LP with a masterful
encore CD whose four best tracks improve songs from their first
life. These were spirited and resilient records that had zero to do
with the world situation they helped the world survive. Career albums
topping career albums, they were music for music's sake, down with
their own programs.

Which brings us--God have I been dreading this--to our
underwhelming winner-by-a-mile and surprise runner-up. Wilco's
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Beck's Sea Change didn't amass
near the support of Dylan and the Strokes in 2001 or
OutKast-Harvey-Radiohead-Eminem in 2000; with voting up 12 percent to
695, they pulled markedly fewer points. But they're Pazz & Jop
albums of the year regardless, and I wish they were easier to tell
apart. Remember folk-rock? Well, this is folk-rock--evolved folk-rock,
postmodern if you must, but folk-rock nonetheless. The giveaways are
(a) pedigree and (b) drumming. Beck has long served as celebrity
spokes-person for an antifolk movement long turned pro, and while
alt-country turned out to be where songwriting adepts Ryan Adams and
Rhett Miller shored up their popcraft against the roil of grunge,
Wilco chose a different kind of genius move--channeling Woody Guthrie
for Billy Bragg. Beck is also the white-funk trickster of Midnite
Vultures, and although I'm truly sorry about his girlfriend, his
groove there was knock-kneed enough to kick off a mutation into
string-swathed crooner of sad songs all by itself. Wilco's drummer is
Ken Coomer--you could look it up, and I bet you'll still have to. His
most prestigious side credit is an inert track on Jerusalem,
which rocks high-octane when Will Rigby is driving.

How I tell them apart is that Wilco is the one I tried to hate and
ended up respecting and Beck is the one I tried to like and ended up
walking around the room until it could get home on its own. As I
relistened, it happened again: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was so
passive-aggressive I wanted to throttle it, Sea Change so
pretty I wanted to tell it I was sorry, only then Beck's songs
vaporized as Wilco's took on a weathered solidity. Clearly, though,
the two share a genetic code: diffident vocals, winsome tunes,
contained tempos, affectless rhythms, and, above all, texture as
aesthetic signifier. Nothing wrong with texture, which as timbre,
melisma, "microtones," etc. is a prized delicacy in almost every kind
of music; in rock and roll, it's been sticking out its tongue at
"classical" canons of tonal purity since 1955. But note that its
present vogue privileges what once would have been called sound
effects, and that these proceed from the sampler and hence hip hop,
though in England they say techno. Most would rate Radiohead's OK
Computer the apogee of pomo texture, well ahead of Beck's
Odelay, but before those two I fell for Latin
Playboys. Where OK Computer's sound effects are also
alienation effects, all dystopian gloom, fractured groove, and
hate-love relationship with technology, on Latin Playboys,
David Hidalgo and Louie Perez conjure places and people past and
present from Tchad Blake's audio treasure chest, blending them in with
a hip, swinging, hip-swinging sense of time. My view of our dystopian
prospect is that if I change my mind now about who was right, bin Bush
has won.

As a token of their transcendent genius, Wilco split the
difference. Our winner is temperate rather than warm or cold, reticent
rather than sociable or disaffected, and barely sampled at all--more
"treated," or just plain arranged. The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep
through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in
Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot, and also than Sea Change, which signals a
retreat by abandoning the sampler for sour strings, gobs of reverb,
and passably parsable lyrics. Both records make a virtue of their
entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to
control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from
slacker days, only slackers were hyperactive, funny, or at least
ironic about it. Wilco's and Beck's integrity comes down to a stubborn
determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and
go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel.

There's honor in this. But right below Beck, a better way glints
through yet another pokey piece of soundscape Americana, the Flaming
Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, where the psychedelic
nutballs joke, cope, hope, and okey-doke with a lot more life than on
1999's The Soft Bulletin. I might have A-listed it if the pink
robot was Dick Cheney instead of a stock sci-fi villain. But not even
the guy I had penciled in above Beck found a way to get that
specific. Had The Rising been half what it intended instead of
a quarter, I could have nattered on about the matched insufficiencies
of broken field run and power play, aestheticism and moralism, shards
of sound and great gallumphing truckloads of good old rock and
roll. But it wasn't. It was a failure, magnificent or pathetic or
tragic or self-important or merely insufficient. Consider Bruce
Springsteen's politics, as left-decent as any in the music. Then ask
yourself how left-decent a reaction he got. And then try to imagine
what better album might have radicalized his return. Should he have
adopted the Mekons' "Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem"? Earle's
"Jerusalem"? Would it have made a damn bit of difference if he had?

What, us effective? Of the finishers who responded directly to
September 11, and there were several, only Earle seemed at all
programmatic, a folkie without apology now. Elsewhere, politics were
personal. If Sleater-Kinney and the Mekons were jolted upward
pollwise, that's because they'd been jolted themselves; if Missy
Elliott name-checked the World Trade on her way to Aaliyah's funeral
and Eminem warned his army to stay out of Rumsfeld's, they were doing
what came naturally. Sonic Youth recorded at Ground Zero without
getting literal about it, chalked up survivor credit, and were
propelled back onto our chart by the musical machinations of fifth
member Jim O'Rourke (also all over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and
since I prefer the late-'90s Kim-and-Thurston Pazz & Jop snubbed,
assume I don't get him). Three "conscious" rap albums--by gabby
Blackalicious, esoteric Common, and the perennial Roots--could have
been recorded in 1997 for all the social science they dropped: career
name-namers Zack De La Rocha and Gil Scott-Heron, for instance,
contribute only righteous generalizations to Blazing Arrow,
which burrows its aspersions on patriotism so deep John Poindexter
will never notice. The opposition was out there. Be-Afroed Mr. Lif
rhymed against the bombing of Afghanistan and finished a respectable
89th; conscious godfathers Public Enemy rhymed against Bush and won
the support of a single cross-dressing punk rocker. But the voters
preferred Common at his uncommon worst, dripping keyb-enhanced
rectitude.

It's conceivable they had no way to know better. Strangely or not,
all of our "alternative" hip hop albums are copyrighted information
products of UniMoth MegaCorp, while Koch signee Public Enemy is now an
indie act no less than Mr. Lif and his Def Jux labelmate,
41st-by-a-tiebreaker RJD2. (41-50, available online like the rest of
our results: soundscaping RJD2, O Dixie Chicks Where Art Thou,
third-with-its-2001-points White Stripes, AYWKUBTTODLAMF, Friends of
Karen O, Tom Waits's unbloodied Alice, she-has-my-2001-points
Pink, Avril fans Boards of Canada, Boards of Canada fans Black Dice,
state-of-the-union address Red Hot + Riot). Although the majors
continued to bleed quality to small businesspeople less burdened by
debt service, support for indie albums among our expanded electorate
slipped slightly. Granted, exact counts are impossible, especially
with every distribution and capitalization deal hiding its own wrinkle
and the sign-'em-up farm-team model making a comeback (see Hives,
Drive-By Truckers, Andrew W.K., Blackalicious, Houston ghetto boy cum
former Rap-A-Lot recording artist Scarface, and soon Yeah Yeah
Yeahs). But really, how was MCA's Blazing Arrow a drastic
improvement over Quannum Products' NIA --music or promotion?
Duh.

Also major-friendly is one of two significant European
movements--not mashups, as indie as it gets even when 2 Many DJ's gets
permissions, but what I'll designate Eurosemipop because Europop
already means anything from ye-ye to Abba to *NSync to Coldplay
itself. It would be willful to deny the tunes and sonics of Coldplay,
Super Furry Animals, Doves, and Soundtrack of Our Lives, and they're
of their own culture. Stateside semipop like Spoon and (O Neko Where
Art Thou) New Pornographers is altogether quirkier and more intense;
the few American bands who aspire to a comparable sound--prominent
melody textured with worked harmonies, whitebread emoting, and
arrangements that mix trad and pomo--end up beefcake or cotton
candy. Which is why only a cowboy like me could call Coldplay or Doves
semi-anything--although they're less laddish about it, in the land of
Blurandoasis they were conceived to go for the gold. Gothenburg's
Soundtrack and Cardiff's Furries are somewhat more boho. But all four
distinguish themselves from, let us say, Clinic and the Hives by
simple virtue of being dead on their feet--even Soundtrack, Stones
fans though they may be. They hire drummers who could beat Ken Coomer
within an inch of his life and then put that power in the service of
the Antifunk. They aim for stasis even when they rock. Stasis is
beauty. And beauty is . . . well, everything, innit?

Lyrically, let's say that the Swedes and Welshmen favor alt-style
allusion where the English bands cultivate well-meaning
commonplaces. I feel Coldplay's and not Doves', but both clearly
whispered radio-video to whoever was running Capitol at the
time. Funk, Antifunk, what's the diff. Just keep it vague, er,
accessible--universal. When that's the name of the major-label
game--which it needn't be, just ask such holdouts as Flaming Youth,
Sonic Lips, E. Costello & His Amazing Gall Bladder, younger
please, er, Queens of the Impending Stone Age, Scandinavia's Greatest
Rock and Roll Band, Shadow Knows, Norah Jones is too all-ages--stasis
is neither here nor there. If there's a market for beats, business
schools, it's your job to provide beats.

For those who favor corporate support of the arts, this has long
been a piece of luck. And in 2002 the voters finally offered clear
statistical indication that great-headed shows of significance weren't
the only evolutionary success in a music that remains blues-based
historically whatever its chords. For the first time since "Sun City"
edged Little Creatures in 1985--after "The Message" and "Sexual
Healing" whipped Imperial Boredom in 1982--more respondents
listed our No. 1 single than our No. 1 album. With a third of the
electorate still standing moot on singles, this makes Missy Elliott's
"Work It" pretty universal--hoisted aloft by 46 percent of the voters
in her category where Wilco limped along at 29. For some voters, radio
is a vast wasteland, the record business in its death throes. But for
many others, pop innovation is at a historic peak, with
artist-of-the-year beatmasters Timbaland and the Neptunes come to
slash and burn the extinction-bound ponderosas on the album chart.

This old argument has never had more weight. Tim and the Neps have
placed 12 records by 11 different artists on our singles charts over
the past two years, with the Tim-and-Missy combo twice No. 1 in a
landslide and "Work It" 's Neptunes-Nelly preamble "Hot in Herre"
third by a single vote in 2002--behind "Lose Yourself," Eminem's rock
song about the rap agon. For purposes of argument I wish two-three had
reversed--Eminem got respect by becoming less interesting and less hip
hop in 2002, and "Lose Yourself" isn't even the best 8 Mile has
to offer (especially 8 Mile the movie). Inconveniently,
however, I never connected with "Hot in Herre"; for me the Neps' great
triumph was the sly funk they fashioned in tandem with Tim and
127th-place Justin Timberlake. If they're the future, as Sasha
Frere-Jones isn't alone in believing, maybe I'm just showing my
age. But hear me out.

The producer as auteur is an idea whose time has come and then
some; having gotten to where what are called beats sometimes reject,
sometimes exploit, and sometimes just are what are called hooks, we
need figureheads with more rebop than Jeff Tweedy. But it's one thing
to insist that musicality in a rhythm music doesn't equal songcraft
plus sound effects, another to explain how any kind of pure
musicianship, rhythmic included, signifies in pop, which achieves
meaning by any means necessary. I should have voted for the
backward-unmasked "Work It," which grabbed me right after our
deadline--it's a surreally inventive novelty, so eventful it would
take thousands of words to describe (love that jackass, or is it an
elephant?). But even more than "Hot in Herre," a novelty is what it
is, a novelty about the liberating power of sex--especially if you
think liberation involves oblivion, an ancient idea in people's music.

This is a myth whose efficacy is well-known at Pazz & Jop's
anti-pop extreme, in the only alt movement of moment: the Brooklyn
bohos who successfully declared themselves a scene in the wake of
9/11, embracing the soft-core porn deceptively trademarked
electroclash before shape-shifting toward an alienated DOR
("dance-oriented rock," we called such earlier overrated bands as the
Bush Tetras, ESG, and Liquid Liquid) best understood by the DFA
label. Result: three charting singles, the dominatrix tongue-in-chic
of the squeaked-on Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP, and the well-chilled eroticism
of half-Brit Interpol's top-20 album. Right, the sexualization of pop
has been accelerating for many years--since MTV, maybe disco. And as
usual--here come da "Sexual Healing," now tell me where da
"Message"--black musicians do it better. Still, this is a party in
hard times however you slice it. Everybody's got a bomb, we could all
die any day. But before we let that happen we'll fuck our lives away.

A believer in sex myself, I voted for Tweet-and-Tim's "Oops (Oh
My)," where Tweet strokes herself in the mirror after a hot date, a
consummation much preferable to Interpol's "You're so cute when you're
frustrated dear/You're so cute when you're sedated dear." But I'm not
convinced anyone should feel obliged to get naked at the drop of a
hint, and wish Missy was autonomous enough to differentiate between
sex-positive and boy-crazy; when she offers to "put my thing down flip
it and reverse it," well, I like the way the image matches the music,
but as a procedural guideline it seems a bit on the fancy side. I love
the track, and in general prefer Tim's gnarled beats (every one a
swamp, with old sneakers, interesting deadwood, and empty Henny
bottles set out like folk sculpture) to the Neptunes' sleek, efficient
ones (more like airports: strong franchise coffee, moving sidewalks,
fluorescent lighting everywhere). But for me the most gratifying
surprise of this poll was the Neptunes d/b/a N.E.R.D.'s In Search
of . . . , which I now love for the same reasons I panned it in
July: Obscenely wealthy, obscenely catchy thugs-by-association
rationalize their ethics and throw their dicks around, only they're
consumed by doubt and hence honest enough to make themselves look like
jerks. As conflicted as Biggie or Ghostface and more self-examined,
they'll be ready for the orgiasts whenever it cools down in
therre--which is not to claim the orgiasts will be ready for them.

There I go, trumping a single with an album like I always
do. Sorry, that's how I hear, and how I want you to hear. I'll never
dis beatmastery, been pumping it forever, but even in hip hop I see
bigger future in the Roots and Cee-Lo, both of whom chose this year to
humanize their formal commitment with injections of singing and
guitar. Up against my fellow citizens over in Williamsburg I'll take
the Drive-By Truckers' underclass regionalism--or the alt logorrhea of
Omaha's/Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and Brixton's/the Streets' Mike
Skinner, one texturing with an 11-piece band featuring bassoon and
cello, the other with low-end electronic junk. And when I want to
escape--which I often do, music is great for it--I have plenty of
living options. Heading my fuck-what-you-say Dean's List, the longest
ever, are the worldly, faithful, Muslim/Catholic, catholic/pagan
Afrosalsa of Orchestra Baobab; the self-sufficient, ears-everywhere,
middle-class microcosm of DJ Shadow; and the mad, bitter, guarded,
indomitable truth-telling of the Mekons. I'm proud they all finished,
never mind where. Jon Langford, who's managed to put out four albums
since last March including one against the death penalty, is my artist
of the year, and I intend to follow his example. The world won't end,
you know. It will just get worse.